Socialism is feasible and practicable

When faced with multiple crises, and all are rooted in the suicidal logic of  capitalism, coming together as one protect humanity and defend its future is the socialist solution. Collective action allows us to cope practically, but also psychologically, to get us through these tough times.  We have to break our own chains. Who is the fool that expects our masters to break them for us?

 Socialism. That is the only way. Now is the moment to reflect on the world as it is and consider a better alternative for the future. Major changes in society can be accomplished. An improved world is possible. We can reshape society for the future and help create a new world. Socialists are helping to build a movement that will reshape the political process.

Socialists are not pacifists. If, at the time of the establishment of a socialist society, the overwhelming socialist majority were confronted by a recalcitrant pro-capitalist minority intent on sabotage and violence, we would have no compunction in using whatever force was necessary to suppress them. But socialism will be a society of peace and harmony which capitalism, with its in-built violence of armies, police forces and production lines, can never be. The class struggle is a messy, violent process. The capitalists will stop at nothing in their struggle for more power within the world market. Workers have no interest at all in ever supporting the capitalists of the country where they live. Only socialists can oppose war and terrorism because only socialists stand in opposition to the system which causes it. There is no other way to destroy the misery caused by organised violence than to abolish its cause. There are no answers to violence within the system of violence and that is why peace and security depend entirely on the establishment of a worldwide socialist society now. 

The Labour Party, in securing the support of the workers by their claims to be able to run capitalism differently from the older parties, have not only strengthened the hold of capitalism over the working class. Although we are in favour of using the parliamentary system to establish socialism, the new society won't be run by a government. Instead it will be democratically administered. Governments are, and have always been, the agents of administration of the ruling class. They are not in existence to run capitalism in the interest of the majority, whatever the intentions of individuals in those ruling bodies may be.

Socialist society will maintain and modify, as necessary, those inherited institutions (healthcare, education, transport systems, etc.) which are necessary for the running of its affairs and set up new ones as appropriate. It will have dismantled all the coercive elements of the state, such as the armed forces, police, judiciary, etc. It will also have to address the productive methods prevailing at the time, stopping all harmful production, and dealing with the rest in the same way as with the political institutions outlined above.

Before socialism can be established there has to be the agreement of the overwhelming majority of the population on how it will be run. Because there are so few socialists at the present time, it is difficult to lay down detailed plans on how it will be run. As socialist ideas spread, there will be more and more input of ideas of how this will be done. Socialism will not come out of nowhere, it will be the culmination of the spreading of socialist ideas, of workers reinterpreting their experience of capitalism and coming to the conclusion that the present system does not adequately deal with their needs. We would not be entering it "cold".

Socialist society will not be an economic society, in the sense that the word is used today. Economists talk about managing scarce resources, but what they really mean is artificially scarce resources. We say that socialism could feed, clothe and house the world's population on a sustainable basis. Socialism would not be  impossible to regulate. In fact, it will be much easier to run. because the complexities of capitalist market forces and the drive for profit will have gone. There will no delicate balancing acts between producing goods to sell for profit and matching peoples' ability to pay. With commerce and all its trappings gone, we would be able to get on with producing goods and services, solely for use. If there is a need for something, and it is deemed realistic to produce it. then it will be produced. Instead of people sitting down and working out the cost of producing in terms of money, it could be decided by the amount of labour necessary to do the job. and whether or not it might be damaging to the environment. Read our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative. This includes chapters on democratic decision-making, organisation of production for use, choice of productive methods, conserving resources, etc.

The working class can grasp the concept of a world community of common ownership. We in the Socialist Party have become socialists without a "guiding hand" and we are not special. We have looked at the world and made our own evaluation of it, based on our experience and the experience of others.

To establish socialism workers of the world would have to act in concert. Socialism would be impossible to establish in one country alone because capitalism is an interconnected world system in economic terms (but not politically—various factions of the capitalist class may well be at each other’s throats) and no one country would be able to opt out of it.

Unfortunately voting for Labour "without illusion" is of no use to the socialist movement. The capitalist class and its government will just read it as another endorsement of their system and it will have the effect of boosting their confidence to run it.

It’s time for a re-think.

 Most of our time is concerned with economic worries either at home or work. People everywhere want real decision-making power over their lives and their society. In today's society, production is geared not for human need but for profit. Every thing that is produced can only be obtained if you can pay for it. Society, the world over, is split into two classes: those who own the means of living (the land, factories, mines, transport, offices) and those who do not own anything but their ability to work — the great majority of people. It is this social system that dictates the way we work. Employment takes the form of workers selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or a salary to an employer. In this transaction, the buyer (employer) has complete control over the direction the work takes. People are forced to work through economic necessity; the less money you have, the less access you have to what you need.

Because the employers own all the tools and instruments of production they have the power to dictate the quality of work, how fast it is to be done and. when it becomes no longer profitable to continue production, to make workers redundant. So workers have no control over their work. When new technology arises workers have no power to control its consequences. Thousands are cast into unemployment and for those who are kept on there is dull conformity and the constant threat of insecurity. People are slaves to the commercial interests of a small minority who, because they own everything, are legally entitled to the profits of the work done in their premises using their equipment.

 Old ideas and old ways of thinking are being discarded with a new direction being adopted aimed at re-organisation our world. People are now understanding that the banks and the stock market produces nothing. According to capitalism’s economic experts workers supposedly have nothing to do with the production of social wealth. To be clear, value comes only from the labor-time of workers producing goods and services in material space-time. Only the work-time of the working class can impart value to commodities. Without workers, there would be no social wealth. In this sense, owners of capital are historically superfluous, a drain on society and the economy. They are not needed. They play no positive role. 

The economy, properly speaking, is the relations people enter into with each other in the course of producing value. Every society has to produce and reproduce their means of existence. Any society that fails to do so, even for a few months, will experience serious problems. Workers and owners of capital enter into a relation with each other that legally permits owners of capital to seize the added-value stemming from the labour-time of workers.

The stock market mainly re-divides and re-distributes already-produced value. It represents the parasitism and decay within the economy. It is an arena in which the richest and most powerful capture the wealth seized not only by weaker and smaller owners of capital, but also the pensions and other funds that belong to workers and the public. “Might makes right” prevails throughout the obsolete “dog-eat-dog” capitalist economic system.

 The market appears as a land of infinite unicorns and rainbows. The notion that “money begets money” (“capitalisation”) is a capital-centered prejudice that fosters the illusion that production does not matter and workers are irrelevant; workers supposedly have nothing to do with the production of social wealth. Money just arises magically. But the fairy tale that “money begets money” is a main reason why the stock market always becomes “over-valued” and eventually crashes. Asset valuations and speculation may extend well beyond the stratosphere, but ultimately they are governed by the laws of motion of economic development and must return to Earth. The chickens always come home to roost, as the saying goes. The “good times” never last. Anxiety and insecurity are always around the corner. Unplanned and anarchic economic activity cannot escape frequent catastrophic collapses.

There is only one race, the human race’: humanity is one, brothers and sisters of one humanity. Peace, brotherhood and justice, equality is nowhere to be found. The path to social harmony will come about through unity not division, cooperation not competition, tolerance not bigotry. It is these qualities that need to be adopted and cultivated.

 Salvation for humanity and for the planet is dependent upon tossing out the entire capitalist economic system  in favour of socialism  and human values over profits and inane infinite growth schemes. 

The present conditions cannot be removed until the present social system is abolished. Socialism means a society without the employer-employee relationship — no job centres or cringing job interviews, no wages and no wasted people. A society of free access to wealth. Work will be voluntary, given according to ability and its main aim will be to satisfy human need, giving satisfaction in accomplishing this task.

Why would people work if they were not paid?

Firstly because the conditions of work will greatly change. People will enjoy full control over the work they do — a vital precondition of people enjoying their work. Secondly, people will be brought up to have complete freedom of experience and to choose a particular type, or types, of work they wish to do (one of the reasons work is so tedious today is the economic necessity of continuously staying in the same job, or line of work, while having next to no control over how it is done — conditions which usually lead to mental stagnation). No one will any longer have to do a job they do not like and we will not be restricted in working in a particular area or part of the world.

The only criteria for dictating what work we do will be what is socially useful and what gives pleasure. Many of the mass produced, characterless commodities of today will disappear. Only the best of whatever is possible will be produced and not, as now, a range of qualities based on what you can afford.

There will be many more people to do the useful work as all workers of the present social system who are engaged in socially redundant or anti social tasks — the armed forces, police. lawyers, accountants, bankers. bookies, insurance workers; and all the victims of it — the starving, the unemployed, the war casualties and suicides, will be able to contribute usefully to society. All the people who are today employed in drudgery in factories, mines and offices will be freed from such enslavement. Technology could easily facilitate many of the most irksome aspects of necessary work and eliminate some of them altogether. General attitudes to work will change when there is a common understanding that all contributions to society will be for the benefit of all members of society. That benefit will be the reward of labour unlike today, when the normal day for many is either: work, pub, sleep or work, television, sleep.

Finally, working conditions will no longer be governed by profitability. In a society based on human need the workplaces will not need to resemble the factories, offices, hospitals and so forth of today where a minimum of safety, comfort and artistic creativity exist. With the restrictions of profitability removed, people will be able, where they work and where they live, to create the best possible environments to complement and inspire those who live and work there. The dark, gloomy factories and the high-rise and terraced slums will give way to civilised surroundings.

Adapted from

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/06/the-stock-market-produces-nothing/

Hostile Environment

Glasgow-born jazz artist Bumi Thomas has been informed that she had 14 days to leave the country or make herself subject for deportation or detainment.

She  was born in Scotland in June 1983 after the British Nationality Act was passed by the Thatcher government in January that year; it stated that children born to parents from the colonies were no longer entitled to automatic citizenship. An immigration tribunal judge ruled in favour of withdrawing the threat of deportation, but she must wait two years before she can apply for British citizenship. Her status is still at the mercy of a divisive immigration policy.

Thomas is one of thousands of people with roots in former colonies, including the Windrush generation, who were made suddenly precarious thanks to a renewed “hostile environment” policy. She had, like many others, assumed she was a British citizen with dual nationality – the 1983 change “was not well communicated to the public in the UK or in the colonies”. After all, her sister, born in the same circumstances but before 1983, is British.  In the early 70s, Thomas’s parents owned a hair salon in Glasgow called Hairlynks, the site of significant black music history.

From class-divided to class-free

Class is not about your accent or your old school tie: it's about what you own and whether you have to work for your living. In theory we all have the freedom to buy a flat in Mayfair or a forest in Scotland. But you don't get far without money. The capitalist media say that everyone is free to become capitalists. But we can't all be rich. After all would we employ and exploit. Only a fool or a liar would contend that we are now living in a society of human equality. World capitalism has as its first characteristic the unnatural, artificial inequality between class and class. 

In a socialist society all human beings will be equals. Without equality there could be no society which could accurately call itself socialist. What do we mean by social equality? We mean that we seek to create a condition of social organisation in which no person is entitled to be regarded and rewarded as superior to others and no person is to be condemned to the disadvantaged position of being socially inferior. In a society of equality there will be no socially superior or inferior people.

We are not advocating a social situation in which no person is superior to another person in any respect. In a society of human equality one person might be a better violinist than another. The inferior violinist might be a better poet or bricklayer than the superior violinist. The significant point is that such differences of achievement (which are almost certainly conditioned rather than innate) will not lead to social inequality. In a society of equals the better violinist will have no opportunity to live a more comfortable life than the violinist whose music sounds awful. The person who is an expert at cutting up human bodies (a surgeon) will have no greater access to pleasant accommodation or decent cigars than the person who is skilled at fixing motor cars (a mechanic). Society needs surgeons and mechanics, violinists and poets.

Just as a society of equality will include people with different levels of talent and skill in various areas of life and work, so it will be a society of humans who are different from each other. The distinction must be understood between equality and sameness. Equality does not imply conformity or uniformity.   Clearly, social equality will not require the elimination of natural human differences. If one person has natural advantages over another (such as the physical strength of the young over the old and feeble) that will not allow such a person to have social domination over those who are so-called natural inferiors. Natural differences such as gender or skin colour are no basis for social differences; it is only in a society of human inequality that these natural distinctions become parts of a battle for power.

 "The market rewards hard work and enterprise," they say.  In reality their rewards are legally stolen from the efforts of ordinary women and men. The capitalist's reward— profit—is no more than the unpaid labour of working men and women.  Even if we had a "share-owning democracy", and everyone had an equal stake in society, even if we divided all the money out with "fair shares for all", the whole system would still be a roller coaster that is not amenable to rational and democratic control. This is because the market system is geared towards production for profit, stimulated by advertising, marketing and credit. The whole aim of the system would still be production for profit and all that this entails—even if there were not the sickening levels of inequality that we now experience; we would still have wasteful hyping of competing products, banking and built-in obsolescence.

The market system has provided the impetus for technological developments but doesn't allow us to take full advantage of them. In a sane society everyone would benefit from advances in technology. Under capitalism research is duplicated and advances in technology are restricted by the patent system. All in the name of the great god—Competition. The market system is characterised by superficial rationality and efficiency within individual firms, but global insanity when all these unco-ordinated and anti-social decisions are added together and seen in the light of the needs of the whole world population. And under this supposedly efficient system there is also the huge waste of unemployment where people living on a pittance are robbed of a chance even of wage slavery. There can be no democracy when decisions about work organisation and how to provide goods and services are made on the basis of profit. Trying to meet the needs of seven billion-plus people through the clumsy workings of the market is like performing microsurgery with boxing gloves on.

In a world where buying and selling dominate. there is a complete disregard for the experience of people in the workplace since the whole emphasis is upon what is produced and whether it can be sold. Wages, health and safety and work satisfaction will always come a poor second best to the need to make a profit. Much welcome discussion about "Green" issues and "quality of life" has managed to avoid one of the main limits upon our real quality of life—the lack of control and creativity that most people experience in their work. Environmentalism has been seen to be largely about buying the right sort of consumer goods. Important though this may be, it leaves aside the fact that the whole reason for capitalist production is not production for need, nor for the satisfaction of the people in the workplace, but production to make a profit on the market.

This is at the very centre of capitalism; and the consequence is that decisions about how goods and services are made are still in the hands of the large corporations. The system cannot gear itself to producing fewer useless goods, producing them in a more satisfactory way for the workers, or democratically deciding how to solve a problem globally.

The only free society will be one where all human beings, without any distinctions of race or sex or age, have free and equal access to the common wealth of the world. Once goods and services are freely available to all, on the basis of self-defined desires, without the interference of money or markets, humans will be able to say in honesty that we are members of a human family—a family of equals.

A Better World For All

To change today’s society and to create a better future for working people is the aspiration of the Socialist Party. We hold that building a better world is both necessary and possible.

Capitalism is a system of commodity production (that is, the production of goods for sale and not for direct use by the producer) which is distinguished by the fact that labour power itself becomes a commodity. The major means of production and exchange which make up the capital of society are owned privately by a small minority, the capitalist class (the bourgeoisie), while the great majority of the population consists of proletarians or semi-proletarians. Because of their economic position this majority can only exist by permanently or periodically selling their labour power to the capitalists and thus creating through their work the incomes of the upper classes. Thus, fundamentally, capitalism is a system of exploitation of the working class (the proletariat) by the capitalist class.  Under capitalism social production replaces the individual production of the feudal era. It is based on an ever-greater socialisation of labour. However, although production is social, ownership is private. The working class produces the commodities which constitute the wealth of capitalist society, but it does not own them. They are appropriated by those who own the means of production – the capitalist class. This situation has led to a worsening of the living conditions of the masses, including escalating mass unemployment, and on the other, it has begun to awaken new forces among the working people to the necessity of establishing workers’ control over, and social ownership of, the main means of production.

Production is socialised to an ever-greater degree while the means of production are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Social production and the socialisation of labour are enhanced by the advance of technology, creating a material basis for the transformation of capitalism into socialism. By replacing private ownership of the means of production by social ownership, by transforming the anarchy of production which is a feature of capitalism into planned proportional production organised for the well-being and many-sided development of all of society, the socialist revolution will end the division of society into classes and emancipate all of humanity from all forms of exploitation of one section of society by another.

It seems clear enough that the capitalist system is honeycombed with corruption and that for this appalling condition there is no remedy other than its complete and final overthrow.The masters of finance and captains of industry offer daily and convincing evidence that they have but one incentive in “business” and that is to exploit the nation, control its destiny in their own selfish and grasping interest, and subjugate the working class.

Working people must have their eyes opened to the fundamental fact that there is no possible way to put an end to the political corruption without removing the cause that produces them. There is little to be gained by limiting our activities to the mere evils themselves which inflict capitalist society. As long as the source of these wrongs remains undisturbed the effects, though temporarily curbed, must again express themselves and with added malignancy. Now what is the cause of the many festering ills which we behold all about us if we but have eyes to see? The answer can be given in a single word: Capitalism.

 It is capitalism, that system of society which is based upon wage-slavery, which has divided the people into two classes, the one consisting of a mass of poverty-stricken, ignorant slaves and the other of a coterie of arrogant, heartless, and polluting parasites. Between these two classes there is war — ceaseless, aggressive, and uncompromising. Capitalism has its foundations in wage-slavery and there can never be social peace while the great mass of the people who work for wages are in bondage.

The Socialist Party will excite working  people with a vision of a world of plenty. Society now has the capacity to devote the energies and talents of its people to satisfying the material, intellectual, emotional and cultural needs of all. New technology provides better, products with less labour. Radical changes in the way a society produces its wealth call for radical changes in how that society is organized. The capitalist class cannot convince the people to believe in their system while they are destroying their hopes and dreams.  The Socialist P arty will inspire our fellow-workers with a society organised for the benefit of all. A society built on cooperation puts the physical, environmental, cultural well-being of its people above the profits and property of a handful of billionaires. When the working class takes  control of all productive property and transforms it into common property, it can reorganise society so that the abundance is distributed according to need. These things will unite our movement against poverty and misery with its great cause: the fight to create a society of abundance, free from want. It will see people from all generations, from all ethnicities and from one race– the human race– come together.

It is up to the Socialist Party to show that we do have a new vision to offer.

Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.

There are times when social and economic problems become so bad that people must choose between the social system that makes their lives difficult and a new one that will improve their lives. Times like that are often called revolutionary times. Many now believe events in the recent weeks show that we are living under such times. But the questions we should be asking is how to make the change and what that change should be. We now face that kind of choice today. Capitalism—the social system we live under—no longer serves the interests of the people. It creates countless problems that it cannot solve. It creates hardship and poverty for millions, while the few who own and control the economy grow rich off the labour of those allowed to keep their jobs. It destroys the cities that we built up. It is destroying the natural environment that is the source of the food we eat and the air we breathe. Technology could and should be used to lessen the need for arduous toil and to enhance our lives is used instead to eliminate jobs and increase exploitation. Poverty is as widespread as it has ever been. Wages go down even as productivity rises. Joblessness, homelessness, helplessness and despair are spreading. Economic insecurity and social breakdown place an unbearable strain on our families, our children and ourselves. Emotional stress, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, and many more signs of unhappiness and hopelessness, are on the rise. Shall we do the common sense thing by making the means of production our collective property, abolishing exploitation of the many by the few, and using our productive genius to create security and abundance for all?

The principles of socialism explains how and why society evolves, how one social system is replaced by another. It is one of the main conclusions of socialist thought that socialism cannot arise BEFORE the economic basis is ripe for it. And this is sound common sense. Each economic system is a growth—out of the previous system. Capitalism grew out of feudalism, and could not, as a system, precede it. A new society cannot come into being until the need for it and the practicability of it, arises. Hence socialism could not precede capitalism, for socialism requires a very high level of production, giant machines, and an educated and trained population to work them. It is capitalism which provides these, and it is because capitalism cannot use the means of production for the benefit of society that the need for socialism arises.

"No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have been matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore, mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation." (Preface to " Critique of Political Economy.")

Progressives ignore this very important lesson of socialism. 

What is capitalism? What are the essentials of capitalism?

Every society has a very definite basis, and every class society a very definite method of exploiting its subject class. This exploitation was not veiled in slave society; one man owned another and made him work. The master gave the slave the necessities of life and retained for himself what was produced over and above the slave's maintenance. The exploitation and slavery of present-day society are to some extent veiled. They are there all right, none the less. The capitalist does not own the worker, but still the worker is dependent on the capitalist class for his livelihood. And how is the worker exploited? Before production takes place today we have capital. This is money invested, for the purpose of profit, in the purchase of machinery, raw materials, factories, etc. But these things are useless without workmen, so capital engages too the energies of the worker. The energies of the worker are used up in producing articles for sale, commodities, but the worker is not paid for the produce of his work for the whole duration of the day. In a working day of eight hours a worker may receive wages equivalent to, say, four hours' produce of his work. The other four hours are given free to the capitalist. It is thus that the worker is exploited under capitalism. Were he paid for the full produce of his eight hours' work there would be no profits for the capitalist class. Whatever minor modifications present-day society may undergo, this is, simply and briefly put, an explanation of the productive process. It is plain to see that wage-labour and capital are the roots of the whole system. Machinery, in simple or complex form, may be employed in any social system—but WAGE-LABOUR AND CAPITAL ARE PECULIAR TO CAPITALISM, and it is by their presence or absence that we can decide whether a society is capitalist or not.

In his "Wage-Labour and Capital" Marx rightly points out that the two are complementary. The one does not exist without the other. He writes: "Capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other. As long as the wage-labourer remains a wage-labourer, his lot is dependent upon capital" And again: "Capital therefore pre-supposes wage-labour; wage-labour pre-supposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence." ( Emphasis by Marx.)

It is true that with the development of capitalism and in different countries the form of ownership and control of capital may differ. But the form of ownership of capital is not the vital question. It may be owned by the small private trader, the large owner, the trust or by the state—"the executive committee of the capitalist class." But in all cases its presence proves the existence of capitalist society.

Many liberal progressives do not recognise that the roots of capitalism are wage-labour and capital, that these are the features distinguishing capitalism from all earlier forms of society. It is not surprising, therefore, that they fail to understand the need for their abolition if we would be rid of capitalism. So it happens that in their “new order" we still have wage-labour and capital—which, as we have seen, spell exploitation and poverty for the working- class.

For progressives, the term "modern capitalism" means unbridled competition, and his solution to the whole problem is the scientific planning of capitalism, so as to cut out competition and make the most efficient use of wage-labour and capital. Their "new order," then, is still capitalism, even if they want wages to be paid according to ability and according to the work done. They relegate to the very distant future, socialism, wherein each will give of his or her best to society and partake of society's products according to his or her needs. It is the old story. Reformists, in that not accepting the socialist case, they are bound to put forward proposals to re-model capitalism—proposals which would still leave the worker a wave-slave and in poverty.

To be really free

Instead of the lash of the whip as in ancient times, capitalism uses a more efficient method to make the workers work. That is hunger. We are told that we are free and the bosses are free. He is free to offer us terms of any kind – we are free to starve unless we accept these terms. Marx has described the worker in capitalist society as a “free” worker. In its scientific, social sense, this means that the worker is “free” from the ownership of property in the “means of production”: factories, machinery, land; that he or she owns only one’s labour power, the ability to work, which is sold to the boss in return for wages. In other words, the worker is only nominally free. He or she is, in reality, a wage slave because the social organisation of capitalism makes it necessary for the worker to sell him or herself to the boss or else to starve. Nevertheless, as compared to previous society, slavery and feudal— workers are “free.” Their bodies are not owned as a chattel; they can return home and a family after work, move to another city, or quit a job for another.

The slave was owned outright. He was the property of the master. All the ancient civilisations were based on slavery. Babylon, Egypt, Carthage, Greece, Rome were some of the civilisations that rested, so to speak, on the backs of the multitude of slaves. The slave was given food and clothing, also a place to relax and rest for further toil. There were variations from this rule. A few were given privileges for special services which they had rendered or for their great skill in some particular direction, but they were still slaves. They understood that their life’s energy was at the disposal and for the benefit of the masters. They were under no illusion as to their social status. They did not think they were free.

When the ancient empires perished, feudalism arose with a new form of exploitation – a new slavery – serfdom.

The serf was a land slave, part of the estate as it were. He went with the land, the buildings and live stock, whenever the estate changed hands. He was different from the chattel slave of old; he was not given food and clothing. He could not be bought and sold. He was not paid for his services with money as the modern wage-slave is paid. He was given the use of a piece of land upon which he and his family, by laborious efforts, maintained their existence.

This land – a part of the estate which he was allowed to work upon three or four days each week – has been called the serf-soil. The other days of the week the serf was compelled to serve on the other part of the estate along with his fellow serfs. They all toiled free. They served the feudal lord, cultivating his soil and herding his cattle, sheep, goats, swine and other livestock.

This mode of exploitation made it quite clear to the serf that he was not a free man. He realised that his working time was given for nothing. But the modern slave, the “free” wage-worker, who is exploited to a greater extent than his predecessors, the chattel slave and the serf, is usually under the illusion that he is a free man.

In modern countries, where machine production holds the field, the wage-worker creates values equal to the value of his week’s wage during a period of time equal to the first day or two of the week. During the rest of the time he is producing for the employer for nothing and usually does not know it. Under the cloak of the pay envelope, the “free” worker is robbed to a greater extent than the slave or serf of old.

As we work, we create profits, such huge profits that even in their wildest extravagances the bosses cannot spend them. So there proves to be no more market for that commodity we are hired to produce; no more profits can be gotten so the free boss lays off the free worker to freely starve in the midst of a land of full warehouses which the worker filled. Capitalism, greedily demanding more and more profits, puts faster machines into the factories which produce goods and profits at a faster and faster rate. Only by overthrowing the system of capitalism will wage-slavery be done away with. The society of socialism alone can eliminate the world of waste. Capitalism’s poverty will be replaced by plenty for all. 

The workers are foolishly supporting the capitalist class in wielding political power against them. For the workers still follow the boss parties.

Understanding what capitalism is

The overwhelming mass of the world’s wealth is owned by only a small proportion of its population. That, like all property societies, capitalism is made up of a small number of owners and a vast majority who own nothing or virtually nothing. Equally important is the fact that this pattern has remained fundamentally unchanged over the years. Working class poverty is an inescapable part of capitalism. As capitalism gets older it gets bigger and more concentrated. As it does so. the worker grows more remote and personally insignificant. This is what Karl Marx, said would happen, over a century ago. Nobody listened much to him then and nobody listens much now.

Whenever they are called upon to vote, our fellow- workers display all the bemused docility which we have long grown accustomed to. They will concentrate on the wrong issues, at the wrong time. They will allow themselves to be misled by the incumbent government’s claim to have been a responsible administration and by the opposition parties that they are the men and women better suited to run capitalism. The election policies of the Tories, the Labour Party and the others always amount to a claim that they are able to control capitalism. As each of capitalism’s crises blows up, there is no lack of political leaders to make speeches which state their solution to it. The workers will not consider the futility of it all and acknowledge the obvious impotence of the political parties to deal a with them.  Nobody seems to notice that some of the schemes are not very different from those which are being blamed for producing the crisis in the first place and that some of the bright ideas contradict others which have been offered before as the solution to our problems. As a whole, they will not even toy with the idea that it might be a good thing to abolish capitalism and to have socialism instead. The working class forgot to ask themselves when capitalism had ever allowed them to live anywhere near as well as some of the people who manage capitalism.

The capitalist class continually train up their experts and economists, but yet still they are caught napping by the vagaries of a market. Capitalism's slumps, like its booms, happen because its wealth is made to be sold. This means that the market is the key to capitalism's fortunes. And the market is a capricious, unpredictable, anarchic thing. It sums up capitalism, that its fortunes should rest in such uncertainty.

The Stock Exchange has spent some time over the past years in trying to improve its public image, which was so badly mauled by the last recession. The Stock Exchange was developed to organise some of capitalism's investments, but even without it there would still have been a capitalist class who would have grown very rich from the work of the rest of us. So when the Stock Exchange pats itself on the back they are making a social virtue out of an anti-social necessity. Socialists want lo live in a free world, which is owned by its people. The Stock Exchange does not help us to live that life: in fact, it does just the opposite. By misleading workers into accepting capitalism as a dynamic, logical, beneficial system it prevents us all from living not just the lives we want but the lives we desperately need.

These are certain essential facts about capitalism upon which we have always based our case against it. However the system may change in small ways, these facts are as relevant today as they always have been.